Happy Wednesday, Wise Owl Nation!

This week's issue is a little more of a thought experiment of mine than any practical advice. Lately, I've been reading and studying a wider array of topics and it has really made me think about why things are the way that they are.

So, this week I want to write about the patterns we as humans have built up over the course of our existence

While reading, think about what is normal, what is not normal, and why that is.

Also, a quick shoutout to those of you that bought me a coffee recently! You are the fuel that keeps me going. THANK YOU!

Let's get into it.

You can find all past issues (including this one) here. 

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🦉 Wealthy Owl Thought(s) of The Week: The Box We Built Together

"We live in an interesting time" - Anyone at any point in human history

We do live in an interesting time though, don't we? A point in time where humanity is better at creating technology than understanding the consequences of that technology.

A point in time where once again gender is becoming a concept that is more fluid than static. (This is a concept that has oscillated throughout human history/civilization)

We live in a time where old cultural and societal norms are in the process of being replaced, updated, neglected, or forgotten.

The more I think about the current times the more it feels we are in a true state of transition. Whether good, bad, or neutral we seem to be leaving one era and entering another.

The Great Resignation is in full swing - a time when people are quitting their jobs en masse. Remote work is becoming the standard. People still wear masks by themselves in their cars despite the CDC renouncing the efficacy of most masks in general.

A time when you can find an article or a study that will support just about any opinion you could imagine.

What is going on?

The Box We Built Together

Humans are experimenters. We are builders. Our life spans are short enough that we can pass on what we know and what we've built with relative ease to the next generation.

What constitutes human civilization is a series of collective choices made one after another and often building on choices and discoveries made before us.

As many an athlete, academic, and artist has said "I stood on the shoulders of giants." This metaphor has existed for literal thousands of years.

Each new generation gets to benefit or suffer from the successes and failures of previous generations. We accumulate knowledge from generation to generation, but by the nature of existence, we don't accumulate experience.

This means that knowledge grows disproportionately with wisdom. We need experience paired with knowledge to find the truth that is wisdom. We have to experience life for ourselves to acquire that wisdom, so we often follow too closely in the footsteps of those that came before us.

Large groups of us go about our lives in a certain way because "this is what I am supposed to be doing" or because "Things have always been this way."

Except things haven't always been this way, and what we are supposed to do is an even weirder rabbit hole I won't venture very far into in this newsletter.

Humans are flawed. Flawed humans built the societies, cultures, and countries we live our lives within. They did their best, just like we are doing ours.

We, like them, are still flawed though. We have built these boxes of what life should be and too many of us never even realize we live in a box that might not be suited for us.

I want you to realize this so you can start thinking about whether or not it serves you.

Some interesting things to think about -

Below are a few areas of life that are worthy of some thought. Some might be outdated, and some might just benefit from additional points of view.

Are Universities worth it? - Had I been born just five years later, I would never have gone to a university. I look back at my time at university and realize I probably did not get the value I paid for. The networking did help me secure work both during and after college.

Even then most of the value of my time at university came from studying abroad for six months. When I ran out of money and had to learn how to feed and provide for myself in a world where my primary language was just a hobby to most of the people around me.

I didn't start really learning about life until I struggled to find success once I entered the real world. Most of my knowledge comes from books I chose to read myself, courses I chose to take online on my own, and information accessible for free on the internet.

For those of you born after the year 2000 (if you are reading this kind of content and you were born after 2000, you are way ahead of the curve) you probably already know all of this. Spending $100,000 on a college degree probably sounds pretty stupid to you. And I can't blame you. You can learn just as much for free online.

What else could you do with $100,000?

You could travel the world for four years acquiring a perspective that is impossible to get at university. You could start a business creating value for others in some way that suits you. You could invest half of it and spend the other half just living and learning in whatever city sparks your interest.

You could do all of the above!

To me paying to go to a University is akin to paying to delay life experience in favor of a four-year stressful vacation. A "vacation" where you are graded on whether or not you are able to subscribe to the point of view of the professors you pay to listen to.

😬

Employee vs Value creator - Why do we seek employers? Over the last half-century, it has become standard to go work for a company to earn the money to build the life you want.

I mentioned the great resignation above, which constitutes the mass exodus from employment that has occurred in the western world. People realized that once they had to work remotely, they could work remotely. No longer were folks bound to their geography to find an income.

For a lot of people, this meant they could earn an income from anywhere, doing anything. New forms of value economies cropped up. Individuals found ways to provide value to others over the internet and get paid for it.

More and more creators are finding customers or viewers on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Twitch.tv, Patreon, Substack, OnlyFans, and places I've never heard of.

There are so many ways to create content a single time that can benefit hundreds or thousands of people. The internet enables leverage.

The point of this little section is that earning a living as an employee is not the only way or the best way to earn that living. Employment is a box that might become outdated for you, especially if your employer isn't going out of their way to heavily incentivize you to stay.

The structure of romantic relationships - I have friends that are monogamous, I have friends that are polyamorous, and I have friends that are all along the spectrum in between.

Some observations - My monogamous friends tend to have more stable relationships that last a lot longer. They also seem to be a lot more prone to jealousy and possessiveness. The polyamorous friends are way better communicators, seem more open-minded, and seem to always be on the verge of some sort of burnout.

There seem to be pros and cons to both, but monogamy is the standard that we all are taught growing up.

One of those poly friends ranted at me on Discord recently saying something along the lines of ...

"I really wish we lived in a society where everyone experimented with non-exclusive relationships. If we all learned how to overcome jealousy and focus on the happiness of our partners we'd all be better off. Hell even if most people went back to monogamy to get married and start families, they'd probably have a much healthier and stable relationship because they'd know how to actually talk to one another. "

Yeah - that definitely gave me pause and made me think.

Who knows what is right, but following one standard path is definitely not the right answer for everyone. Love outside the box, maybe? 🤷🏼‍♂️

Modern Life is probably too easy - I've written about this before a couple of times, but there are a lot of powerful tools in existence today that put the game of life on easy mode. It often doesn't feel like easy mode because we don't have the perspective of what life was like before modern comforts like cars, television, the internet, and memes 😜.

Stress and anxiety seem to be more and more common, but is that because it was never talked about in the past? Is it because our modern diets are so screwed up? Or could it be because we struggle so infrequently that when it happens it really messes us up?

I don't know. What I do know is that my days are much easier if I work out. Do my days magically become easier? Probably not, but because I forced myself to struggle and suffer a little during a workout, my perception of the rest of the day is changed.

We are a privileged society. All of us. Some are more privileged than others but compared to humans even 30 years ago, we all are vastly more privileged.

We don't have to hunt, forage, or farm our own food.

We don't have to acclimate to the changes of weather.

We don't have to die or lose a limb because we broke a bone.

Struggle inside or outside the box, so that the box feels less intense.

Quote/Meme of the week:

#perspective

Have a great week!

This concludes our issue this week, I hope it gave you some perspective or injected a little motivation into your life!

If it helped, let me know! I read every newsletter response I receive, and I absolutely love hearing from all of you. This newsletter is for you, so I need your help to make it as great as possible.

If you'd like to show me some love for writing all this free stuff, you can always buy me a coffee.

More Resources

I will be adding to this section over time as we find resources that will help you all.

• Check out the Wise Owl Store
• All Wise Healthy Wealthy Articles on Medium
• Start your own Sendfox Newsletter
• Free products to help you level up

Crypto Resources

The Bankless Podcast: This is a link to the bankless podcast on Spotify. Start from the very beginning and learn why I am so positive about the power of Crypto and Ethereum in particular. You can find the podcast easily on the internet, but I am linking to episode 1 on Spotify for your convenience.

Buy your first ETH or BTC:

• On Coinbase - this is the easiest starting place for the newest beginners
• On Gemini - Another great option founded by the Winklevoss brothers. They are based out of New York.
• On Kraken - Kraken has a bit of a harder user interface, but they already have ETH staking enabled with the push of a single button.

Earn interest on your crypto

• BlockFi - Currently, you can earn 4% interest on BTC, 5% interest on ETH, and a whopping 8.5% on stable coins like USDC. Use the referral code b09f24fd to support the newsletter. BlockFi is currently not accepting new customers from the USA for its Crypto Savings Account. International customers are still welcome!

Other tools:

• Argent Wallet - This is the best mobile wallet for Ethereum, Defi, and all things on the Ethereum network, including staking. They even have plans to implement Layer 2 to remove network fees.
• Ethhub - this is a weekly newsletter that lists out all the interesting news, articles, and tweets that have happened in Crypto that week. It's free and awesome.
• Ethdashboard - A simple dashboard to look at various metrics in the ethereum space. I mainly use this as a quick tool to check ETH gas fees.
• Cointracker - this is one of the better tools for tracking all of your various crypto across all of the various wallets, exchanges, etc. You can also use them to do your crypto taxes each year.
• Metamask - this is a crypto wallet that you can access from your browser and allows you to easily interact with blockchain apps online.